Alexandrina Orzan

Research themes

Generally speaking, I'm interested in:

Image synthesis and image processing for expressive rendering

User interaction techniques for computer graphics

Perceptually-based rendering

My PhD work focused on user-guided image manipulation. The principle that spans my doctorate studies is that we can represent, create and edit pictures using a "contour-drawing" metaphor.
Just as classical visual arts use line drawings as a starting point, we use the contours in a line drawing as a basis on which to build a digital image representation.

This principle is used in our SIGGRAPH 2008 paper, where we proposed a new vector-based primitive for creating complex color gradients: the diffusion curve.
We showed that this representation is a simple, powerful and intuitive way of defining vector graphics images. Furthermore, diffusion curves can be extracted automatically from a photograph by relying on an edge-based structure
we proposed in our NPAR 2007 paper.
Diffusion curves can also natively handle textures, as described in our EGSR 2009 paper.